Robert Motherwell

In 1940, a young painter named Robert Motherwell came to New York City and joined a group of artists — including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline — who set out to change the face of American painting. These painters renounced the prevalent American style, believing its realism depicted only the surface of American life. The style that emerged was Abstract Expressionism which depicted essential images that revealed truth and authenticity of feeling. 

The Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Guggenheim Bibao, Spain; Guggenheim Museum, New York City; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art all hold collections of Robert Motherwell.

Beyond his individual efforts as an artist, Motherwell played a major role in the intellectual and artistic development of the underground New York art. Motherwell received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Stanford University and completed one year of a philosophy Ph.D. at Harvard before shifting fields to art and art history. His rigorous background in rhetoric would serve him and the abstract expressionists well, as he was able to tour the country giving speeches that articulated to the public what it was that he and his friends were doing in New York. Motherwell's greatest goal was to use the staging of his work to convey to the viewer the mental and physical engagement of the artist with the canvas.  

Near the end of his life, Motherwell continued to search for a personal and political voice in abstraction. This search produced a body of work that remains a testament to the human soul and its persistence, and to the genre of abstract painting out of which it came.